Tag Archives: mixed child

Crazy Euopean People, Crazy Family, Crazy Germans

The Annual Airport Festival

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In the beginning of September (so half a century ago according to my blogging schedule) we went to the annual airport festival here in my hometown. Yes my little town has an airport, okay it might be more a very small airfield and not so much of an airport. Only small aircrafts can start and land there so there is no issue of noise complaints ever. I was actually checking out just now what kind of airfield it is but the Germans surely got their own laws and regulations which do not even translate into English so I won’t bother you with that! This airfield was a military airport back in WWII and after the war the airport was reduced in size to give way for a new city district which was built for the thousands of refugees arriving here such as my dad back in the day.

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Enough of the history and categorization of this so-called airport and let’s get back to the festival. Though I have lived rather long here already before moving to Finland I had never visited this festival. I do not even know for how long this festival exists already except that it must be going on now for at least 8 years. I know that because back then my parents visited the festival as they have a friend, who is flying a glider, invited them. As this festival was right between the time MIL had left us to return to China and my parents return from their 4 month-long holiday we took this opportunity for some family time.  From our home it is only 10 minutes by bicycle to the airport which made it very convenient for us to go there on both festival days. As you can imagine it was a very confusing but also exciting event for a 2 1/2-year-old boy! When he saw the first helicopter flying over our heads he went crazy, not as in crazy as everyday MIL, but happily crazy.

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One of the bit older gliders at the festival

On one side of the airfield were several food stalls and the tents of the different companies offering flights in either helicopters, gliders, gyrocopter, historical planes or different light aircrafts. You could also sign up for some parachute jumping but that is not really my thing as I might have some little fear of heights. Most surprisingly for us was that two of our friends were also at the festival and were just preparing for their parachute jump! I bet that the girl would have not jumped if she would have known back then that she was already in her first month of pregnancy. They also provided tons of entertainment for kids with several amusement rides, jumping castles and also a little track for quad driving (small quads with not so much power). In retrospect the quad driving was probably more intended to give the dads some fun while pretending to take care of their kids sitting in front of them.

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#Nathancuty loves to drive the Suzuki

The whole festival was very interesting as you could see all kind of different planes and other flying vehicles. They also had the Antonow AN-2 flying around which is the biggest operational single-engine biplane. We had plans to take a little tour with a light aircraft but the waiting list was a bit too much for us with its 2-3 hours of waiting time. So in order to let Nathan enjoy his time there we let him have some rounds in the amusement rides. We  had the before-mentioned quad ride for him but he clearly did not really care about as he kind of looked depressed in the pictures.

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The huge Antonov is arriving

For us it was a nice experience to go to this airport festival. We learned a few things about the different planes, Nathan had lots of fun, it is nearby and best of all the entrance is for free. Next year we will definitely go again and then we will sign up early enough for a flight in one of the planes!

Have you visited something like an airport festival before?

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Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Germans, Mom in Law, Our cute son, Travels

City Tour Extreme: Day One, Nanjing

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Our holidays in China are over but I still feel exhausted from the crazy city tour we had. As mentioned before I have a lot to write about this trip, in fact too much so I will have few posts about the different days. The first day of the tour was in Nanjing where we met the rest of the tour group. We had actually arrived in Nanjing the night before but we pretty much didn’t see anything except the airport and our luxury hotel.

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View from our luxury hotel

I know that Nanjing has so many things to visit and I was worried that we would only rush to the different locations as we had only one day there. Oh silly me, I shouldn’t have worried about rushing to all the different spots as we visited only two! Yes two locations we visited before going back to the hotel for the night. No we did not visit the old city fortifications, nor the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, nor Yuejiang Lou, nor any former Nationalist time governmental buildings and and and. I think you can see that we did not visit many places and that I was kind of disappointed. This was not only in Nanjing the case but any other place we visited during those five days.

In the beginning of the tour we basically went to our tour meeting spot by the lake and then drove by bus to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum 中山陵. The construction of the tomb started in 1926 and was finished in 1929. In case you don’t know about Dr. Sun, he was the first President, founding father of the Republic of China and posthumously named “Father of the Nation”. The mausoleum is located at the Purple Mountain and the area is just huge.  As it is located at the mountain slope there are more than just a few steps leading up. The vault is located more than 700m away from the entrance to the mausoleum and the main stairway has 392 steps leading up. During our visit it wasn’t too crowded so we didn’t have to line up anywhere. Once reaching the top of the view is just incredible.  In the vault you can not actually see the tomb as that room has been locked up due to vandalism few years back.

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Top of the stairs of the Mausoleum

After the trip to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum we had another wonderful trip with the bus to our next location: Nanjing Fuzimiao 南京夫子廟.  Back in the years (many years back!) the Nanking Imperial University was placed there as well as a Temple of Confucius. Over the years the place has been destroyed multiple times and most of the current buildings are from the 19th century or even younger. In 1985 it has been restored and you can find now many cultural attraction there but also various places for shopping and last but not least there is a huge variety of different food. Now I was myself not too happy there as it dawned on me that the whole city tour would be like this leaving too many wonderful places out.

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Going around Nanjing Fuzimiao

I wish we could have visited all the other places as well but I know that is never really the purpose of those Chinese tour groups. Thing is we faced many problems with this tour group. For one it was not cheap at all but most annoying the whole schedule was changed. Okay not for all of us as only we had the wrong schedule and the entire rest of the group had the correct schedule. Our original schedule was more relaxing as times for driving between the different cities was better planned and we would have seen more in the cities than just one or two places. Needless to say we were not pleased at all with the whole situation and we wanted to quit the trip more than just once. To make matters worse is that it started to rain after the first day for the rest of the trip and temperatures plummeted down from 30 degrees Celsius to 15-18 degrees Celsius.

Have you ever travelled with a tour group?

Be sure to follow me also on Facebook and on Twitter as I will post there occasionally pictures which do not find their way into my blog posts. Furthermore I also have a YouTube Channel in which some videos might pop up from time to time

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Crazy Family, Mom in Law

Mother in law visiting

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I have mentioned it plenty of times before: Mom in law will be visiting us in February. And as you are a careful reader of this blog you also know it is because her grandson will be born in that month. Basically she will be here to help us out. Basically…but my wife and me know also the other reason, she is especially here to spend hours a day in the shopping malls looking for stuff to buy. However she never buys anything anyways except stealing hours of our lives away…

In the past months we both came up with a plan how to survive with mom in law (the detailed plan can be found here https://crazychinesefamily.com/2013/10/28/how-to-make-life/). But we are not that cruel to think only about ourselves so actually we created also a little plan on how to make the stay enjoyable for her. Here are some of the main points of that plan.

 

Food

She is Chinese, my wife is Chinese = they love food. Problem is that my wife’s mom is not making the best food other than some noodle dishes and jiaozi 饺子.Honestly, I am not a big fan of her food and in my opinion my wife makes much better food (she agrees). This leads to the need of visiting Chinese restaurants on a more frequent level than usual. Because my wife and me did not fear any hardships during the past years in discovering new Chinese restaurants in our area, we have a handful of good ones to visit. They are a bit different from the usual restaurants as they usually two different menus. There is one menu for Finnish people and one menu for Chinese people. The menu for the Finnish people is obviously less spicy, less well tasting and has less variety. Sadly visiting those restaurants on a daily basis is out of the question due to the high costs here in this cold cold country but at least once a week should be possible.

 

Shopping

Mom in law loves shopping. I believe she would even sleep in the shopping mall given the chance. Thankfully we have three shopping malls in close proximity and additional two or three involving 20-30min car ride. Due to these perfect conditions I do not have to worry about the shopping part at all (except the costs involved if she actually finds something she likes…)

 

Snow

According to my wife, she really wants to play in the snow. No problem, here should be plenty of it by then. However I don’t know how long she will enjoy it and furthermore we will need to buy her some good winter clothes.

 

The Baby

Mom in law wants a cute mixed grandson. No problem, our son will be the cutest baby ever (no offence to other babies 😉 )

Great news is that she will help us out with the child, the not so great news is that I don’t really know who might be more annoying at night; the baby crying at night or mom in law snoring as loud as a starting jet plane.

 

Presents

Yes you read right, presents. As any good Chinese who wants to keep face she will have to bring some nice presents for her family and friends. Luckily we have a huge collection of fragrances, make-ups, cremes etc. due to the profession of my wife. So finding presents for her female friends and relatives won’t be a problem. The presents for the men will be a different story. Alcohol here in Finland is incredibly expensive and mostly pretty bad (I would not recommend any local beer to foreigners if they do not wish to feel very sad). This means that those presents are still mostly a big question mark in our plan.

 

Travelling

She will be three months here and spending that much time only in one apartment and few shopping malls will even get boring for my mother in law. However due to the baby we won’t be able to take her to any nice places or countries. But my parents came up with a solution! We will take a ship cruise to Germany, stay few weeks with my parents and go back by ship to Finland in April. With this mom in law will experience some other country she hasn’t been visiting yet, my own parents can see their grandson and even better, we can buy some presents which are still required so mom in law can keep her face.

 

This is our “Big Plan” thus far. Additional points might be still created or other parts changed (and no, the cutest baby part will stay). Have you ever made similar plans when your parents in law came to visit?